The Setup - "Alexander Hamilton" & The Question of Narrative Power
Hamilton opens with a question that haunts all national origin stories: "How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence impoverished get up and climb?"
This is Lin-Manuel Miranda asking: WHO GETS TO BE REMEMBERED? Who gets their story told? Whose narrative survives?
Nigeria's founding story has the same problem. We celebrate Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Ahmadu Bello, and Kwame Nkrumah (the "Big Four"), but how many know about Herbert Macaulay? Samuel Ajayi Crowther? Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti fighting for women's rights while the "official" founding fathers got the credit?
In "Alexander Hamilton," we meet a young immigrant with ambition. In Nigeria's founding, we meet men shaped by colonialism, educated abroad, returning to fight for independence. But like Hamilton, the question persists: who decided these men were the heroes?
Hamilton created the Treasury and a national bank. Nigeria found oil.
Oil should have made Nigeria wealthy. Instead, it made Nigeria's elite extraordinarily wealthy while ordinary people got poorer.
Why? Because Nigeria inherited a colonial extractive economy and never fundamentally transformed it. The oil was supposed to be Nigeria's version of Hamilton's financial system, the source of national power and wealth.
Instead, oil became the source of elite enrichment, regional conflict (North vs South vs Niger Delta), and financial extraction without development.
"It's Quiet Uptown" could be Nigeria's song: we got independence, we got resources, we did nothing truly transformative with them, and now we're grieving a potential we never realized.
ifiokambrose
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The Oil as Currency - Nigeria's Financial System